As soon as the chickens moved
on to their new, sunny pasture, I got to work improving their
old pasture. 
The flock had scratched the ground relatively bare over the winter, and
I had also used it as a spot to toss compostables, weeds from the
garden, and tree prunings, so it needed a bit of work.  The
chickens ate everything tasty out of my compost piles and spread the
rest out over the ground (adding in some droppings to expedite
composting), so I
raked the remaining debris up into two woody compost piles (for
long-term composting) and two normal compost piles.



Several large branches had
fallen out of the wild cherry in the middle of the pasture, and I used
these to shore up the sloped part of the pasture.  Chicken
scratching plus hillsides equals erosion, and I wanted to be sure to
hold all that soil into place.  I spread a healthy dose of white
clover seeds across bare patches on the sloping land in hopes of
creating a solid groundcover that can stand up to later chicken abuse,
adding in a bit of oat seeds on a whim.



The flat part of the pasture
will be a new grain/legume paddock this year, so I planted about a
third of it in oats and another third in field peas.  The last
third is going to be bare until the frost-free date, at which time I
plan to plant it (and probably the field pea section if the plants are
mature by then) with amaranth, millet, field corn, cowpeas, and
sunflowers.  Come fall, I’ll seed the paddock once again with
winter wheat.

Meanwhile, our first
pasture has been home to wheat since November, and the grass-like
leaves are finally starting to grow again.  A heavy covering of
snow over the pasture for half of the winter tempted moles to come in
and dig around, uprooting wheat in several areas.  I’ll be excited
to see how the remaining wheat pans out over this summer, and will
replace it with rye in the fall.



These two pastures are
our grain paddocks, meant to grow some of the chickens’ feed for the
winter months when insects are hibernating.  But I may still run
the chickens through the pastures in August or September when the
grains have grown up over their heads and the chickens can do little
damage.

One week after being
introduced to their new pasture, the chickens have scratched up perhaps
a fifth of the area to bare soil.  I estimate that this pasture is
about 700 square feet, so our chickens are at a stocking density of 140
square feet per chicken — amazing that they can make such a large
impact in such a short time!  The bare
minimum pasture standard would keep them on this
pasture for 14 weeks, but we’ll probably rotate them to a new patch of
ground in another week or two.  I want the flock to do a little
more damage first, though, because I have plans for those patches of
bare ground.



I was a bit concerned that so
few birds in such a large pasture would spend all of their time sitting
beside the coop.  So I had Mark install the gate at the opposite
end of the pasture and have been feeding the chickens their morning
rations, food scraps, and wheelbarrow loads of weeds right inside the
gate.  This has split the chickens’ interest, and they seem to
spend time pretty evenly throughout the pasture (and always come
running to the gate when I get close.)  I wonder how big a pasture
would have to be before chickens would ignore the extreme edges?